Potential PendingFileRenameOperations Tampering

Severity: medium
Author: frack113
Source: upstream

Detect changes to the "PendingFileRenameOperations" registry key from uncommon or suspicious images locations to stage currently used files for rename or deletion after reboot.

MITRE ATT&CK coverage

Tactic	Techniques
Defense Evasion	`T1036.003` Masquerading: Rename Legitimate Utilities

Event coverage

Provider	Event ID	Title
Sysmon	13	RegistryEvent (Value Set)

Stages and Predicates

Stage 1: `selection_main`

TargetObject|contains: '\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\PendingFileRenameOperations'

Stage 2: `1 of selection_susp_paths`

Image|contains: '\Users\Public\'

Stage 3: `1 of selection_susp_images`

or:
Image|endswith: '\reg.exe'
Image|endswith: '\regedit.exe'

Indicators

Each row is a field, operator, and value that the rule matches. The corpus column counts how many other rules in the catalog look for the same combination: high numbers point to widely-used, community-vetted indicators. Blank or 1 shows that the indicator is specific to this rule.

Field	Kind	Values
`Image`	ends_with	`\reg.exe` corpus 46 (sigma 46) `\regedit.exe` corpus 8 (sigma 8)
`Image`	match	`\Users\Public\` corpus 8 (sigma 8)
`TargetObject`	match	`\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\PendingFileRenameOperations`